All posts tagged race

The Wall Street Journal’s Review served up some of the most-discussed essays of 2012. Below, a list of the most-read essays of the year.

Why French Mothers Are Superior
While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying ‘non’ with authority

The New American Divide
The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.

Why the World Needs America
Foreign-policy pundits increasingly argue that democracy and free markets could thrive without U.S. predominance. If this sounds too good to be true, writes Robert Kagan, that’s because it is.

Why Airport Security is Broken — And How to Fix It
Air travel would be safer if we allowed knives, lighters and liquids and focused on disrupting new terror plots. A former head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, on embracing risk.

Why We Lie
We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity, writes Dan Ariely.

Lee Siegel’s essay, “Rise of the Tiger Nation,” will undoubtedly provoke sharp reactions both within and outside the Asian American community. The fact that I was mentioned as an example of Asian American success (I won “Survivor” during the controversial thirteenth season when the contestants were divided by race), combined with the shirtless photo of me that accompanied the article, has already caused me some consternation. As soon as it was published, my wife sent me a text demanding to know why I no longer look like I did in the photo (My lame response: “Er…I’m married with kids?)”

My friend, Jeff Yang, has written an excellent response explaining why blanket assertions about Asians and Asian Americans are misguided, so I won’t try to articulate the same points here in less articulate fashion.

However, I do think it’s worth highlighting one critical difference between Jews and Asian Americans that Siegel’s essay doesn’t touch upon. In general, Jews are more easily able to assimilate into American society because of the absence of easily identifiable physical traits that distinguish them from other “white” Americans. For example, Jon Stewart is Jewish (he was born “Jonathan Leibowitz”), but most people would never know this If he didn’t make reference to his Jewish background. By contrast, one of the drivers of the enduring “perpetual foreigner” stereotype for Asian Americans is the fact that we obviously look different from whites (as well as blacks). Consequently, it often doesn’t matter if we were born in the US, educated here, work here, or even Americanize our names – the immediate presumption that many people make upon seeing us is that we’re foreigners because we don’t look conventionally American.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on people who had committed their crimes before the age of 18. In this term, it is weighing whether life without parole is also a penalty too severe for people who, in the eyes of many, do not possess the same level of self-control, maturity, and comprehension of the consequences of their actions as adults.

A recent study looked at whether white Americans’ beliefs about this issue are influenced by race. Perhaps unshockingly, they turned out to be. …

That black women tend to be heavier than white women, and yet manifest less dissatisfaction with their bodies, has been well documented by social scientists.

That black men and white men have different thoughts about the ideal female body type has tended to be debated (or joked about) more in the pop-culture arena. But now researchers have studied the link between the two mindsets and found that, indeed, those divergent male ideals help to shape female self-esteem:

The same team of researchers behind a recent study finding that older jurors convict at higher rates than their peers used a similar methodology to look at the more contentious issue of race.

Again, they looked at felony trials in Florida, from 2000 to 2010. And again they concentrated on the fluctuation in the composition of the jury pool, from day to day, rather than that of the seated jury (the former being more random than the latter, and therefore permitting the researchers to see more clearly the variables at work). They find evidence, they write, that

According to a study recently published in Political Behavior, white voters view black presidential candidates who are subject to rumors of extramarital affairs differently from how they view white candidates. The study, conducted in 2008, before the primaries, used Barack Obama and (awkwardly, it turns out) John Edwards as the test cases.

Presented with a news story about possible affairs, illustrated with one or the other candidate posing with two attractive (white) women, voters began to view Mr. Obama as more liberal than they had before — and also to like him less. The shift for Edwards was smaller, where perceived ideology was concerned, and, in the case of overall evaluation, not statistically significant….

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."